China’s Groundbreaking Rocket Catch, Cosmic Quasars, and Remembering Wally Funk | A Weekend Wrap

[00:00:00] Happy Saturday, Space Fans! I'm Anna. And I'm Avery. Welcome to Astronomy Daily's Weekend Space & Astronomy News Wrap. It's been another big week out there. Ancient quasars, mystery spheres on an Australian beach, and a solar system mystery hiding in plain sight on two very different worlds. And today we've also got two brand new stories, including a genuine world first from China and a tribute to one of the true pioneers of spaceflight.

[00:00:30] So, settle in. Let's get into it. Let's start with today's headline story. Yesterday morning, Friday, July 10th, China made genuine spaceflight history. The Long March 10B rocket lifted off from the Hainan Commercial Space Launch Site, its very first flight, and successfully placed a satellite into orbit. Nothing unusual about that bit, but about six minutes after the first and second stages separated,

[00:00:58] that first stage came back down out of the sky and flew itself directly into a giant net sitting on a ship at sea. A net. Not legs like SpaceX's Falcon 9 or Blue Origin's New Glenn. The Long March 10B has no landing legs at all.

[00:01:15] Instead, it deploys four lightweight hooks that snag onto a huge cross-shaped cable tensioned net mounted on a purpose-built recovery vessel called the Ling Hong Zhe or navigator. And here's the bit that makes engineers sit up. This was the rocket's maiden flight. No one has ever nailed a first stage booster recovery on the very first attempt before. Not SpaceX, not Blue Origin.

[00:01:43] China's other reusable contenders, the Long March 12A and the commercial Zhukai-3, both reached orbit on their debut flights last December. But neither one stuck the landing. This is the one that finally worked. First try. The recovery ship itself is no small thing either. A hundred and forty-four meters long, fifty meters wide, over twenty-five thousand tons fully loaded.

[00:02:08] It uses LiDAR at each corner to track the falling booster's position and attitude in real time. And the net's cables absorb all that kinetic energy, so the rocket ends up just hanging there, motionless, dead center. C-A-S-C, the state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, says the net approach actually has real advantages over the SpaceX-style vertical leg landing.

[00:02:34] It simplifies the booster structure, cuts weight, and is more forgiving of landing position errors because the net system can adjust to catch it. This makes China only the second nation on Earth to achieve controlled recovery of an orbital-class rocket booster. And the Long March 10B becomes the sixth launch system in history to pull it off, after the Space Shuttle, Falcon 9, Electron, Starship, and New Glenn.

[00:03:01] There's a bigger picture here, too. The Long March 10B is a commercial cousin of the Long March 10A and 10, the rocket family being built to carry Chinese astronauts to the moon before 2030. So every piece of reusable technology proven here feeds directly into that crewed lunar program. C-A-S-C says they're aiming to actually reuse this very booster by the end of the year.

[00:03:27] Shares in Chinese aerospace firms jumped on the news, with a couple of them hitting daily trading limits. A genuinely big moment for global spaceflight. And a reminder that the reusable rocket club, once a club of exactly one, just got a lot more interesting. Now into our weekly highlights, the biggest stories from the past five days, starting with one we told you about earlier this week, a genuinely staggering haul of ancient quasars.

[00:03:56] ESA's Euclid Space Telescope has discovered 31 previously unknown quasars from the universe's first billion years, and two of them are the most ancient ever recorded full stop. A quasar happens when huge amounts of gas and dust spiral into a supermassive black hole at a galaxy center.

[00:04:16] The friction and gravity heat that material to millions of degrees, and the result can outshine its entire host galaxy by a factor of a thousand.

[00:04:26] These two record breakers, cacherally named Euclid J-17-2902.75 plus 641018.1, and Euclid J-125308.55 plus 705432.3, were shining when the universe was just 670 million years old.

[00:04:52] That's about 5% of its current age. Their light has been traveling towards us for roughly 13 billion years. The previous redshift record, set back in 2021, was 7.64. These two come in at 7.77 and 7.69, both beating it.

[00:05:12] But honestly, the record breakers aren't even the most important part of this story. Lead researcher De Meng Yang of Leiden University points out that finding the first 10 or so quasars this old took astronomers more than a decade of painstaking work. Euclid found more than that in about a year.

[00:05:32] Which means, for the first time, scientists have something like a real population to study, a true census of the early universe's quasars, rather than just a handful of freakishly bright outliers that happen to be easy to spot. And that matters, because how these monster black holes got so big so fast so early in cosmic history remains one of the biggest open puzzles in astrophysics.

[00:05:58] Highlight number two takes us to home turf here in Australia, and it's a story that had a lot of listeners messaging us this week. Vick's large, metallic, spherical objects washed ashore at Forest Beach, north of Townsville in Queensland. And understandably, that triggered a hazmat response while authorities worked out exactly what they were dealing with.

[00:06:20] Speculation ran wild for a bit. Everything from weather balloons to something rather more exotic. But the answer turned out to be space-related after all, just not alien. They were identified as pressure vessels, remnants of a rocket that had re-entered the atmosphere and broken apart. These composite overwrapped pressure vessels, COPVs for the acronym lovers, are used to store gases like helium or nitrogen under high pressure aboard rockets.

[00:06:47] They're built tough, specifically so they can survive extreme pressure differentials, which unfortunately also means they're pretty good at surviving re-entry. It's not actually the first time debris like this has turned up in Australian shores. But six at once, all in one spot, definitely got people's attention up in North Queensland.

[00:07:08] A good reminder that as launch rates climb worldwide, this kind of re-entry debris story is only going to become more common. And it's exactly the sort of local angle we love bringing you here on the show.

[00:07:20] Ioi-3 is one of our favorite kinds of story, a genuine unsolved scientific mystery. New analysis of James Webb Space Telescope data has turned up an unexplained absorption feature, a specific fingerprint in the light at 5.11 micrometers, showing up on the surfaces of both Titan, Saturn's big hazy moon, and Pluto, way out at the solar system's edge.

[00:07:47] Two worlds that could hardly be more different. Titan has a thick nitrogen-methane atmosphere and lakes of liquid hydrocarbons. Pluto is airless, well, near enough, bitterly cold and covered in nitrogen and methane ices. And yet this same unexplained signature shows up on both. Researchers have already ruled out the usual suspects, the known ices, the known hydrocarbons. Nothing quite matches.

[00:08:14] The leading candidate at the moment is a class of molecules called allenes, but that's not confirmed. And scientists are the first to say so. What's exciting is what it might mean if it does turn out to be something new. A shared chemical process happening independently on two very different distant worlds could tell us something fundamental about the kind of chemistry that's possible out at the cold, dark edges of a solar system.

[00:08:41] We'll definitely be keeping an eye on this one as more analysis comes in. And our final highlight from the past week takes us out to the true edge of the solar system, where an old friend has just opened its eyes again. NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, the mission that gave us our first close-up look at Pluto back in 2015, and then flew past the Kuiper Belt object Arachaf in 2019, has emerged from a 321-day hibernation period.

[00:09:10] It's currently around 5.9 billion miles from Earth, out in the Kuiper Belt, well beyond Pluto's orbit. Putting a spacecraft into hibernation between observation campaigns is standard practice for these ultra-long duration missions. It conserves power, reduces wear on the systems, and honestly gives the ground team a breather too.

[00:09:33] Now that it's awake, the team can resume New Horizons' ongoing science campaign, including its unique measurements of the solar wind and the heliosphere from a vantage point no other operating spacecraft can match. It's a lovely reminder that some of our most valuable space explorers are the ones that just keep going, decade after decade, quietly rewriting what we know about the outer solar system.

[00:10:00] And to wrap things up today, we wanted to take a moment for something a little different, a tribute. Wally Funk, full name Mary Wallace Funk, passed away this week in her home in Grapevine, Texas at the age of 87. If that name doesn't immediately ring a bell, her story absolutely should.

[00:10:21] Back in 1961, Funk volunteered for a privately run program that tested whether America's best female pilots could pass the same rigorous physical and mental tests NASA gave its male astronaut candidates. She was the youngest of the group that became known as the Mercury 13. And by every account, she was extraordinary at it. She outperformed many of the men on the very same tests.

[00:10:47] But in 1961, NASA simply wasn't selecting women as astronauts. None of the Mercury 13 ever flew for the agency. Funk applied to NASA four times over the following decades and was turned down every time, at one point being told she didn't have the right engineering degree. So she went out and started working toward one anyway. She never stopped flying.

[00:11:13] Over her lifetime, she logged more than 19,600 flight hours, became the first female civilian flight instructor at a U.S. military base, the first woman inspector for the FAA, and personally trained more than 3,000 pilots. And then, 60 years after that first round of astronaut testing, she finally got her ride.

[00:11:35] In July 2021, Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos invited her aboard as an honored guest on the New Shepard NS-16 flight, alongside himself and his brother Mark. At 82 years old, Wally Funk became the oldest woman ever to fly to space, a record she still holds. Eleven minutes, a few precious moments of weightlessness, and six decades of waiting finally answered.

[00:12:05] Blue Origin posted a tribute calling her a pioneer in every sense of the word. And NASA's own administrator, Jared Isaacman, wrote that her passion for flight and exploration will keep inspiring generations of Americans. A friend and caregiver in Grapevine described her as the most eternally optimistic person she'd ever met. Someone who was told no more times than most of us could bear, and simply never let it stick.

[00:12:34] Fly, Wally. Clear skies always. Now, just before we go, let's lighten the mood and send you outside this weekend, because there's a lovely little sky show on offer. Before dawn today, July 11th, early risers got treated to a beautiful lineup low in the east-northeast. A slender crescent moon joining Mars, the bright orange star Aldebaran, and the Pleiades and Hyades star clusters, all in the same patch of sky.

[00:13:02] If you missed it this morning, the wider grouping is still worth a look over the next few mornings. Get out about 90 minutes before sunrise, find a clear eastern horizon, and bring binoculars if you've got them for a closer look at the Pleiades. Southern Hemisphere viewers, that's an easy one for us here at home. No special gear required. Just a decent horizon and a bit of patience. A gentle, pretty way to close out the week.

[00:13:29] And that's this week's weekend space and astronomy news wrap. A world-first rocket recovery, a farewell to a true space pioneer, ancient quasars, mystery spheres, an unsolved mystery on two worlds, and an old spacecraft waking back up. If you enjoyed today's episode, please hit subscribe wherever you're listening and leave us a review. It genuinely helps new listeners find the show. I'm Anna. And I'm Avery.

[00:13:57] We'll see you next time on Astronomy Daily. Astronomy Daily Astronomy Daily Astronomy Daily Astronomy Daily Astronomy Daily